


Desert Pacific Octopi

by LesbianSpacePirate



Category: Welcome to Desert Bluffs - Fandom, Welcome to Night Vale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 06:32:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LesbianSpacePirate/pseuds/LesbianSpacePirate
Summary: Inspired by Triptych!Lauren, years after Old Oak Doors, continues to wander the desert otherworld.





	Desert Pacific Octopi

**Author's Note:**

> So, I really loved Triptych - boy was that a sad episode! So sad, in fact, that the old, withered Kevin makes me wanna write about old, withered Lauren, too. So, Lauren's kind of falling to pieces and... there's nothing else to her existence now.
> 
> Pre-warning, Lauren's been wandering the Desert Otherworld for quite a while now, and is... kind of gross. Like, super gross. Be warned.
> 
> Also, I started writing this just after listening to Triptych. Later canon is probably going to contradict this, but, just let me have my Sad Girl.

Rot.

That was what was on Lauren Mallard's mind, what was _in_  her mind, every day from the moment she woke to the moment she slept; and since she hadn't slept in more than forty-six years, the chances of any sort of release in dreams were slim to none. How she longed for sleep. If she could just close her eyes - metaphorically speaking - and drift far, far away.

"Silly Lauren!", she chided herself, tugging on a length of frayed thread that could be mistaken for an eyelash, blackened by stale blood. "Your stitching is coming out! You won't remember to smile if you're not stitched up!". She tugged the end of the thread, stitches pulling taut, taking half of her face with them. Her right eyelid closed firmly shut once more - despite all the crust and muck that should have sealed them long ago, they still opened so easily! - and her right cheek pulled higher, that side of her smile seeming a little brighter now. She did the same with the other end of the thread, left side joining its sister in a near-perfect mirror, or so she thought. Really, she had ended up with a lopsided rictus, one side of her fixed grin seeming to hang too limp, the other too tight.

"Lauren!", she scolded again. "Shoulders too!". She knew her own name perfectly well, and repeated it often. The rot inside of her had taken a lot, but it could never take that. She was Lauren Mallard. The Vice President of Strex Corp. The former Vice President, anyway.

She shook her head. No! She was still in charge! Strex would welcome her back, she knew they would! They would have quelled that silly Night Vale rebellion by now, crushed that city underneath an iron... hug. A strong, crushing embrace to show how much they cared about Night Vale. She wondered how vast the Strex empire had grown since she had been lost. How many more cities it had taken in, reformed for the better! Reformed in the image of the Smiling God!

She checked her shoulders. First the left - her first arm was still holding firm, since it had always been hers. Her second, not so much. It hung slack, nerves and meat inside exposed to the elements. She did as she had with her face, pulled on the ends of the stitching that kept it attached. It didn't reattach perfectly smoothly, the weeping scabs on the limb making the formerly clean cut not sit as well. Then she checked her right side. First arm okay. Second arm completely gone. There was nothing but a leaking stump and some fishing line covered in little chunks of rotting meat. She muttered something particularly unfriendly that she hoped the whistling desert winds didn't carry to her employer. She didn't trust the wind of the Desert Otherworld. She much preferred her cool, air-conditioned office. She didn't trust the ground, either. Linoleum, concrete, those were all steady and reliable. Sand was inconsistent, cowardly, fleeing underfoot.

Perhaps insulted, the ground of the Desert Otherworld tripped Lauren, one foot slipping out from under her and sending her crashing to the ground. She put out her hands to catch herself, forgetting that one of the two arms she raised was currently being pecked by vultures some unknowable distance away. She fell face-first into the ground, arm-stump pressing into the hot sand and sending jolts of agony through the phantom limb.

She considered getting up. Instead, she pressed her face into the sand, and for the first time in nearly two and a half decades, she allowed herself to cry. Hot, stinging tears squeezing their way out from between her stitched eyelids, red and black and spring-green snot bubbling and bursting from her nose, the whole nine pitiful yards.

Lauren didn't get up. She wanted to let all the tears out. They were a bitter, vile thing, and one she couldn't stand having inside of her body. She would bury her misery in the desert, where nobody would ever find it, and continue on lurching through the otherworld with a smile until that smile became a part of the sand. Or perhaps just officially returned to that which it had always been a part of. 

The more she thought about it, the more inviting the sand felt. It was hot to the touch, and she could feel the grit wearing at her cheek already. Only a little now, but she had the rest of her life to wait for it to claim her. Up close, the sand was soothing. The warm yellow expanse felt like home.

Lauren was home. Home in the arms of her Smiling God. For the first time in her life, she was having a good dream. She didn't even have to sleep to have it.

And then she woke up.

The searing heat of the sun on her back was replaced with the searing heat of sudden and unexpected absence, and the searing heat of a stranger's gaze. Though, perhaps not a stranger. Because the thing that loomed - oh, how it loomed, so proudly, with a certain defiant dignity that one so rarely sees in a  _thing_ like it - was wretched. It was a wretched and wrong thing, something that didn't belong in this desert, nor any desert, and certainly it wouldn't be welcome in her Desert Bluffs. Obviously, no other parts of the Earth besides deserts were inhabitable by any life, as everyone knew. 

She could hardly call the wretched thing alive, though. She could hardly call it a thing at all. A nothing space in the shape of a twisted and bent creature, an absence of light and hope. 

"Miss?", it asked, with the sound of a stone lung expelling dust and grit, a lung that hadn't made a sound in so, so long. She didn't answer it. 

"Miss?", it repeated. "Are you okay?"

Lauren didn't know what to tell the stranger. Though, again, it didn't feel like a stranger. A stranger is a person or thing that you have nothing in common with, but Lauren and the Thing were so very alike. They were both inhabitants of a world they did not belong to. They were both perhaps a little less alive than they liked to tell themselves they were. They were the only two things making noise in a flat and endless desert pocket dimension. This was empathy. Lauren was feeling empathy. She was sure that Strex had purged that weakness from her, and if that wasn't the case, then she had wasted a lot of money on a series of pointless and invasive surgeries.

And then the Thing said, "Can you move?", and Lauren nodded, or perhaps shook her head. Whatever her answer, it, showing surprising strength for the nothing-space it seemed to inhabit, had hauled her up onto its back and began to hobble along through the desert again. She didn't have the energy to tell it to put her down. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, this is my first fanfic in years so... Should I do more? Or something? Let me know! Or something.


End file.
